Charles Austin Beard was, with
Frederick Jackson TurnerFrederick Jackson Turner was an American historian in the early 20th century. He is best known for his essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", whose ideas are referred to as the Frontier Thesis. He is also known for his theories of geographical sectionalism...
, one of the most influential American historians of the first half of the 20th century. He published hundreds of monographs, textbooks and interpretive studies in both history and political science. His works included radical re-evaluation of the
founding fathers of the United StatesThe Founding Fathers of the United States of America were political leaders and statesmen who participated in the American Revolution by signing the United States Declaration of Independence, taking part in the American Revolutionary War, establishing the United States Constitution, or by some...
, who he believed were motivated more by economics than by philosophical principles. Beard's most influential book, written with his wife
Mary BeardMary Ritter Beard was an American historian and archivist, who played an important role in the women's suffrage movement and was a lifelong advocate of social justice through educational and activist roles in both the labor and woman's rights movements...
, was the wide-ranging and bestselling
The Rise of American Civilization (1927), which had a major influence on American historians.
Beard was famous as a political liberal, but he strenuously opposed American entry into World War II, for which he blamed
Franklin D. RooseveltFranklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
more than Japan or Germany. This stance destroyed his career, as his fellow scholars repudiated his foreign policy and dropped his materialistic model of class conflict.
Richard HofstadterRichard Hofstadter was an American public intellectual of the 1950s, a historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University...
concluded in 1968: "Today Beard's reputation stands like an imposing ruin in the landscape of American historiography. What was once the grandest house in the province is now a ravaged survival."
Youth
Charles Beard was born into a wealthy Indiana family in 1874. In his youth he experienced the rigors hard physical labor working on the family farm and attended a local Quaker school,
SpicelandSpiceland is a town in Spiceland Township, Henry County, Indiana, United States. The population was 890 at the 2010 census.-Geography:Spiceland is located at ....
Academy. He was expelled from the school when he and his brother Clarence printed a pamphlet criticizing the faculty and administration of
Indiana UniversityIndiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...
, where Clarence was a student. Charles graduated from Knightstown High School in 1891. For the next few years the brothers managed a local newspaper. Their editorial position supported the Republican Party and favored prohibition, a cause for which Charles Beard lectured in later years.
Beard attended
DePauw UniversityDePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, USA, is a private, national liberal arts college with an enrollment of approximately 2,400 students. The school has a Methodist heritage and was originally known as Indiana Asbury University. DePauw is a member of both the Great Lakes Colleges Association...
where he studied history until graduating in 1898. He edited the college newspaper and belonged to the debate team. At a dance class, he met
Mary RitterMary Ritter Beard was an American historian and archivist, who played an important role in the women's suffrage movement and was a lifelong advocate of social justice through educational and activist roles in both the labor and woman's rights movements...
, whom he married in 1900. As a historian, Mary Beard's research interests lay in
feminismFeminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
and the labor union movement (
Woman as a Force in History, 1946). They collaborated on many works of history, including the popular survey,
The Beards' Basic History of the United States.
Oxford
Beard went to England in 1899 for graduate studies at Oxford University. He collaborated with Walter Vrooman in founding Ruskin Hall, a school meant to be accessible to the working man. In exchange for reduced tuition, students worked in the school's various businesses. Beard taught for the first time at Ruskin Hall and he lectured to workers in industrial towns to promote Ruskin Hall and to encourage enrollment in correspondence courses.
Columbia
The Beards returned to the U.S. in 1902, where Charles pursued graduate work in history at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
. He received his doctorate in 1904 and immediately joined the faculty as a lecturer. In order to provide his students with reading materials that were hard to acquire, he compiled a large collection of essays and excerpts in a single volume:
An Introduction to the English Historians. That sort of compendium, so commonplace in later decades, was an innovation at the time.
An extraordinarily active author of scholarly books, textbooks, and articles for the political magazines, Beard's career flourished. Beard moved from the department of History to Public Law and then to a new chair in Politics and Government. In addition to teaching, he coached the debate team and wrote about public affairs, especially municipal reform.
Economic Interpretation
Among many works he published during these years at Columbia, the most controversial was
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), an interpretation of how the economic interests of the members of the Constitutional Convention affected their votes. Academics and politicians denounced the book, but it was well respected by scholars until the 1950s.
Resigns in First World War
Though he completely supported American participation in the First
World WarWorld War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, he resigned from Columbia on Oct. 8, 1917, charging that "the University is really under the control of a small and active group of trustees who have no standing in the world of education, who are reactionary and visionless in politics, narrow and medieval in religion. I am convinced that while I remain in the pay of the Trustees of Columbia University I cannot do effectively my part in sustaining public opinion in support of the just war on the German Empire."
Independent scholar
He soon helped to found
The New SchoolThe New School is a university in New York City, located mostly in Greenwich Village. From its founding in 1919 by progressive New York academics, and for most of its history, the university was known as the New School for Social Research. Between 1997 and 2005 it was known as New School University...
in Greenwich Village, New York City, where the faculty would control its own membership. He later left to enjoy his home in rural Connecticut free of academic responsibilities; his many books and textbooks provided a steady stream of revenue. Enlarging upon his interest in urban affairs, he toured Japan and produced a volume of recommendations for the reconstructing of
Tokyo, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...
after the earthquake of 1923. His financial independence was secured by
The Rise of American Civilization (1927), and its two sequels,
America in Midpassage (1939), and
The American Spirit (1943), all written with his wife, Mary.
Beard had parallel careers as a historian and political scientist. He was active in the
American Political Science AssociationThe American Political Science Association is a professional association of political science students and scholars in the United States. Founded in 1903, it publishes three academic journals...
and was elected its President in 1926. He was also a member of the
American Historical AssociationThe American Historical Association is the oldest and largest society of historians and professors of history in the United States. Founded in 1884, the association promotes historical studies, the teaching of history, and the preservation of and access to historical materials...
and served as its president in 1933. He was best known for his studies of the Constitution, and for his creation of bureaus of municipal research and his studies of public administration in cities,
Isolationist
Though he had been a leading liberal supporter of the
New DealThe New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
, Beard turned against Franklin Delano Roosevelt's foreign policy. He became one of the leading proponents of
American non-interventionismNon-interventionism, the diplomatic policy whereby a nation seeks to avoid alliances with other nations in order to avoid being drawn into wars not related to direct territorial self-defense, has had a long history in the United States...
. He promoted "American Continentalism" as an alternative, arguing that the United States had no vital interests at stake in Europe and that a foreign war could lead to domestic dictatorship. He continued to press this position after the war, even when the American victory in World War II seemed to have discredited his earlier warnings. Beard's last work,
President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (1948), blamed Roosevelt for lying to the American people and tricking them into war. Most historians and political scientists rejected Beard's theory and it damaged his reputation.
By the 1950s Beard's economic interpretation of history was also out of favor; only a few prominent historians held to his view of
class conflictClass conflict is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests between people of different classes....
as a primary driver in American history, among them
Howard K. BealeHoward Kennedy Beale was an American historian. He specialized in nineteenth and twentieth-century American history, particularly the Reconstruction Era. He also wrote biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Edward Bates, and Charles A. Beard. Beale was born in Chicago to Frank A. and Nellie Kennedy...
and
C. Vann WoodwardComer Vann Woodward was a preeminent American historian focusing primarily on the American South and race relations. He was considered, along with Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to be one of the most influential historians of the postwar era, 1940s-1970s, both by scholars and by...
.
Progressive historiography
As a leader of the "
progressive historiansProgressive historians, or progressive historiography, designates a school of American historians whose leader was Charles A. Beard.- References :* Turner, Beard, Parrington, by Richard Hofstadter,...
," or "progressive historiography," Beard introduced themes of economic self-interest and economic conflict regarding the adoption of the Constitution and the transformations caused by the Civil War. Thus he emphasized the long-term conflict among industrialists in the Northeast, farmers in the Midwest, and planters in the South that he saw as the cause of the
Civil WarThe main explanation for the origins of the American Civil War is slavery, especially Southern anger at the attempts by Northern antislavery political forces to block the expansion of slavery into the western territories...
. His study of the financial interests of the drafters of the
United States ConstitutionThe Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It is the framework for the organization of the United States government and for the relationship of the federal government with the states, citizens, and all people within the United States.The first three...
(
An Economic Interpretation of the ConstitutionAn Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States is a 1913 book by American historian Charles A. Beard. It argues that the structure of the Constitution of the United States was motivated primarily by the personal financial interests of the Founding Fathers...
) seemed radical in 1913, since he proposed that the U.S. Constitution was a product of economically determinist, land-holding founding fathers. He saw ideology as a product of economic interests.
Constitution
Historian Carl Becker in
History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-1776 (1909) formulated the Progressive interpretation of the American Revolution. He said there were two revolutions: one against Britain to obtain home rule, and the other to determine who should rule at home. Beard expanded upon Becker's thesis, in terms of class conflict, in
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) and
An Economic Interpretation of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915). To Beard, the Constitution was a counter-revolution, set up by rich bondholders ("personalty" since bonds were "personal property"), in opposition to the farmers and planters ("realty" since land was "real property.") Beard argued the Constitution was designed to reverse the radical democratic tendencies unleashed by the Revolution among the common people, especially farmers and debtors. In 1800, said Beard, the farmers and debtors, led by plantation slave owners, overthrew the capitalists and established
Jeffersonian democracyJeffersonian Democracy, so named after its leading advocate Thomas Jefferson, is a term used to describe one of two dominant political outlooks and movements in the United States from the 1790s to the 1820s. The term was commonly used to refer to the Democratic-Republican Party which Jefferson...
. Other historians supported the class-conflict interpretation, noting the states confiscated great semi-feudal landholdings of loyalists and gave them out in small parcels to ordinary farmers. Conservatives, such as
William Howard TaftWilliam Howard Taft was the 27th President of the United States and later the tenth Chief Justice of the United States...
, were shocked at the Progressive interpretation because it seemed to belittle the Constitution. Many scholars, however, eventually adopted Beard's thesis and by 1950 it had become the standard interpretation of the era.
Beginning about 1950, however, historians started to argue that the progressive interpretation was factually incorrect because it was not true that the voters were polarized along two economic lines. These historians were led by Charles A. Barker, Philip Crowl,
Richard P. McCormickRichard Patrick McCormick was a historian, former University Professor of History, administrator, professor emeritus at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey and President of the New Jersey Historical Society. Dr...
, William Pool, Robert Thomas, John Munroe, Robert E. Brown and B. Kathryn Brown, and above all
Forrest McDonaldForrest McDonald , is an American historian who has written extensively on the early national period, on republicanism, and on the presidency. He is widely considered one of the foremost historians of the Constitution and of the early national period.- Life :McDonald was born in Orange, Texas. He...
.
Forrest McDonaldForrest McDonald , is an American historian who has written extensively on the early national period, on republicanism, and on the presidency. He is widely considered one of the foremost historians of the Constitution and of the early national period.- Life :McDonald was born in Orange, Texas. He...
in
We The People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (1958) argued that Charles Beard had misinterpreted the economic interests involved in writing the Constitution. Instead of two interests, landed and mercantile, which conflicted, McDonald identified some three dozen identifiable interests that forced the delegates to bargain.
Evaluating the historiographical debate,
Peter NovickPeter Novick is an American historian, best known for writing That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession and The Holocaust in American Life...
concluded:
- “By the early 1960s it was generally accepted within the historical profession that ...Beard’s Progressive version of the ...framing of the Constitution had been decisively refuted. American historians came to see ....the framers of the Constitution, rather than having self-interested motives, were led by concern for political unity, national economic development, and diplomatic security.”
Beard's
economic determinismEconomic determinism is the theory which attributes primacy to the economic structure over politics in the development of human history. It is usually associated with the theories of Karl Marx, although many Marxist thinkers have dismissed plain and unilateral economic determinism as a form of...
was largely replaced by the intellectual history approach, which stressed the power of ideas, especially
republicanismRepublicanism is the ideology of governing a nation as a republic, where the head of state is appointed by means other than heredity, often elections. The exact meaning of republicanism varies depending on the cultural and historical context...
, in stimulating the Revolution. However, the legacy of examining the economic interests of American historical actors endures.
Reconstruction
Dealing with Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, disciples of Beard such as Howard Beale and
C. Vann WoodwardComer Vann Woodward was a preeminent American historian focusing primarily on the American South and race relations. He was considered, along with Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to be one of the most influential historians of the postwar era, 1940s-1970s, both by scholars and by...
focused on greed and economic causation and emphasized the centrality of corruption. They argued that the rhetoric of equal rights was a smokescreen hiding their true motivation, which was promoting the interests of industrialists in the Northeast. The basic flaw was the assumption that there was a unified business policy. Scholars in the 1950s and 1960s argued that businessmen were widely divergent on monetary or tariff policy. While Pennsylvania businessmen wanted high tariffs, those in other states did not; the railroads were hurt by the tariffs on steel, which they purchased in large quantity. Beard's economic approach lost influence in the history profession after 1950 as conservative scholars suggested serious flaws in Beard's research, and attention turned away from economic causation.
Isolationism
The unapologetic isolationism that Beard espoused in the final decade of his life was rejected by most contemporary historians and political scientists. However, some of the arguments in his
President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War influenced the "Wisconsin school" of
New LeftThe New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
or
revisionistIn historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of orthodox views on evidence, motivations, and decision-making processes surrounding a historical event...
historians in the 1960s, among them
William Appleman WilliamsWilliam Appleman Williams was one of the 20th century's most prominent revisionist historians of American diplomacy, and has been called "the favorite historian of the Middle American New Left." He achieved the height of his influence while on the faculty of the Department of History at the...
,
Gabriel KolkoGabriel Kolko is an American historian and author.Kolko was born in Paterson, New Jersey, attended Kent State University and the University of Wisconsin , married Joyce Manning in 1955, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1962. Following graduation he taught at the University of Pennsylvania...
, and
James WeinsteinJames "Jimmy" Weinstein was an American historian and journalist best known as the founder and publisher of In These Times...
. On the right, Beard's foreign policy views have become popular with "
paleoconservativesPaleoconservatism is a term for a conservative political philosophy found primarily in the United States stressing tradition, limited government, civil society, anti-colonialism, anti-corporatism and anti-federalism, along with religious, regional, national and Western identity. Chilton...
" like
Pat BuchananPatrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan is an American paleoconservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster. Buchanan was a senior adviser to American Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's Crossfire. He sought...
. Certain elements of his isolationism, especially his advocacy of a non-interventionist foreign policy, have enjoyed a minor comeback among a few scholars since 2001. For example,
Andrew BacevichAndrew J. Bacevich, Sr. is a professor of international relations at Boston University and a retired career officer in the United States Army...
, a historian of diplomacy at
Boston UniversityBoston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
, has cited Beardian skepticism towards armed overseas intervention as a starting point for a critique of post-Cold-War American foreign policy in his
American Empire (2004).
Primary sources
- Beard, Charles, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) online edition
- Beard, Charles, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, (1915) online edition
- Beard, Charles, The Administration and Politics of Tokyo, (1923) online edition
External links